Hope you’re doing well.
Yesterday, I chanced upon this big fat
green book and realized that it was about you. Thank you for sharing about the
thirteenth year of your life – As Madame Crommelynck puts it ‘Ackkk, a wonderful, miserable age. Not a
boy, not a teenager. Impatience but timidity too. Emotional incontinence.’
I had never heard of a place called Black
Swan Green in Worcestershire. A few pages into your story and I thought, ‘Is
this going to be another ‘Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha’?’ Have you read it? It’s by
Roddy Doyle and is about a boy like you.
I know you stutter but I’m sure you’ll
get over it. I know how ugly people can get when they discover that; it’s
difficult yeah. I like the way you have interspersed incidents and situations
across chapters; they seem like short stories but are yours and are interwoven
into that one year. I think that’s super duper. They’re full of discovery and
adventure. I understand being a part of the herd is important, else you’re treated
like a pariah dog, and a very few can stand against it and in turn handle and survive
the bestowed agony but I’m proud of you Jace.
I’m sorry but I have to say this – as I
read your accounts, a few of your rambling thoughts and derived wisdom seemed a
bit too much or unreal for a thirteen year old but yes, on further pondering
over it myself, I felt it’s possible; it all depends on what and how much and
when and how you’ve seen things. There is more wisdom packed in your thoughts
than in most self-help books I’ve read. I particularly liked this one - Me, I want to kick this moronic bloody
world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting
people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right.
You’ve experienced a lot and what I
like is the clarity with which you have expressed your thoughts and the
happenings; there doesn’t seem to be a clouding between the incidents and their
recordings. Friendship, your first smoke, your first kiss, the losing of a
priced possession, the near loss of innocence, being bullied to the verge of
breaking down, the finally doing the right thing; it’s all there. I liked
‘Solarium’ the best; Madame Crommelynck comes across as a cranky old woman but
I’d have loved to meet her; she came across as someone who doesn’t mince words
or at least now doesn’t. I read names like Robert Frobisher and Vyvyan Ayrs in
your memoirs, related to Ms. Crommelynck and that reminds me that I’ve read
these names before, probably in a book called the ‘Cloud Atlas’. I simply love
her thoughts on beauty and poetry –
…‘T.S. Eliot expresses it so
– the poem is a raid on the inarticulate. I, Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck,
agree with him. Poems who are not written yet, or not written ever, exists
here. The realm of the inarticulate. Art.’ She put another cigarette in her
mouth and this time I was ready with her dragon lighter, ‘fabricated of the
inarticulate is beauty. Even if is
themes is ugly. Silver moons, thundering seas, clichés of cheese, poison
beauty. The amateur thinks his words,
his paints, his notes makes the beauty. But the master knows his words is just
the vehicle in who beauty sits. The master
knows he does not know what beauty is. Test this. Attempt a definition now. What
is beauty?’
…‘Difficult?’ (Her ashtray was in the shape of a curled girl, I
saw.) ‘Impossible! Beauty is immune
to definition. When beauty is present, you know. Winter sunrise in dirty
Toronto, one’s new lover in an old café, sinister magpies on a roof. But is the
beauty of these made? No. Beauty is here, that is all. Beauty is.’
Sometimes relationships are just a name
and not what they seem. Just like Black Swan Green – you mentioned there never
were any swans there – neither black, nor green, nor white – no swans. Well,
sometimes people are also not what they seem. I’m sorry to hear about your
parents and particularly about Ross Wilcox; do you think he deserved what he
got? Your stories hint a lot of karma; do you believe in it? And sometimes, I
hope you agree, we too aren’t what we put on display – the swan surfaces
because it’s beautiful and intriguing in the midst of others but it disappears
when we’re alone. I’m glad you met the gypsies – our hatred towards them is the
same as theirs towards us, only the perspectives are different. And when you
heard from them and I from you, it surprised me about the things they said – so
true, we were never shown the mirror.
There – you’ve got me contemplating
like you. When I started this letter to you, I didn’t know what to write and
like always ended up writing a lot. So now, here, I stop. Someday, I’ll read
you again. Take care.
‘It is difficult to avoid, yes.’ Madame
Crommelynck kept her eyes on Robert Frobisher. ‘This girl wants my forgiveness,
before she dies. She begs me, “I was eighteen! Robert’s devotions were just a …
a… flattery game for me! How could I know a famished heart will eat its mind?
Can kill its body?” Oh, I pity her. I want to forgive her. But here is the
truth.’ (Now she looked at me.) ‘I abhor that girl! I abhorred her all my life
and I do not know how to stop to abhor her.’
My rating: 8/10
Image courtesy
David Mitchell - https://stuttertalk.com/tag/black-swan-green/
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